5:15 PM - 6:45 PM
[A-AS05] Large-scale moisture and organized cloud systems
Water vapor plays a significant role in regulating the global atmospheric circulation, especially in the troposphere. The overturning circulation is directly driven by the longwave radiative cooling of water vapor and the latent heating/cooling through microphysical processes to balance it. This global circulation is composed of diverse atmospheric phenomena with various spatial and temporal scales. Developments of some significant turbulent motions such as 3D isotropic turbulence in clouds, stratocumulus and cumulus convection, squall lines and tropical cyclones, and the Madden-Julian oscillation, are essentially associated with moisture anomaly in each scale. Moisture is accumulated and advected relatively slowly in larger horizontal scales, but is consumed relatively quickly in smaller ones. This significant scale gap between the accumulation and consumption and strong nonlinearity may be one of the causes of the long-lasting difficulty in developing the theory of the moist atmosphere. The aim of this session is to share recent research results about the relationships between moisture and organized cloud systems in wider ranges of spatial and temporal scales to enhance collaborations between modeling, observational, and theoretical approaches in tackling this challenging task. Research results relating to the data analysis of in-situ and/or satellite observations, radiative-convective equilibrium model experiments, mesoscale simulations of severe weather, and global cloud-resolving climate simulations are particularly welcome.